In the health care industry as well as in many other commercial and industrial applications, it is often necessary to monitor the effectiveness of processes used to sterilize equipment such as medical and non-medical devices, instruments and other articles and materials. Sterilization monitors can be included in the batch of articles to be sterilized to assay the lethality of the sterilization process. They can also be used to validate the effectiveness of sterilization equipment and sterilization cycles used in such equipment.